Start-Up’s Profile: SolidFire

Name
SolidFire, Inc.

Headquarters
Boulder, CO

Founded in
December 2009

Financial funding
37 million from NEA, Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle Venture Partners, including two rounds at $11 million and $25 million in 2011.

Main executives, most of them from LeftHand Networks and HP

•  Dave Wright, founder and CEO: He left Stanford in 1998 to help start GameSpy Industries, in online videogame media leading a team that created a backend infrastructure powering thousands of games and millions of gamers. GameSpy merged with IGN Entertainment in 2004. He served as chief architect for IGN and lead technology integration with FIM / MySpace after IGN was acquired by NewsCorp in 2005. In 2007 he founded Jungle Disk, in cloud-based storage and backup solutions for consumers and businesses, acquired by Rackspace in 2008 where he worked with the Rackspace Cloud division to build a cloud platform supporting tens of thousands of customers.
• RJ Weigel, president: Prior to SolidFire, he served as VP for Americas Global Accounts-Enterprise Storage Organization at HP. He came to this role through 3Par, where he served as WW VP of sales and field operations prior to acquisition by HP. He also spent several years with Cisco.
• John Hillyard, CFO: He most recently served as CFO of Datalogix, a digital media marketing company. Prior to that, he was the CFO of LeftHand.
• Jay Prassl, VP marketing: He was employee number five at LeftHand, where he spent 10 years.
• Mark Glasgow, VP WW sales: He lead sales at Xiotech for more than 6 years.
• Tim Pitcher, VP international: He was senior director of global account storage at HP after its acquisition of 3Par. Prior to that, he served for 8 years as area VP at NetApp.
• Daniel Berg, VP engineering: He joins from Avaya where he was VP R&D. Prior to that, he was CTO at Skype after working at Sun, IBM and Honeywell.
• Adam Carter, director of product management: He led product management at LeftHand, HP and VMware
• Jim Burglin, director of support and services: He built a support and services team for Scale Computing. He also helps LeftHand grow their base to over 3,000 customers.
• Dave Cahill, director of strategic alliances: He was founder of Diligence Technology Advisors, starting his career at EMC, being an early member of the Centera business unit.

Among the board’s directors: Bill Chambers who was VP of LeftHand division in the HP StorageWorks organization

Number of employees
80

Technology
All-SSD storage solution designed for large cloud environment.

Product description

Clustered with industry-standard hardware and iSCSI, the flash array is scalable from 5 to 100 nodes / 2PB / 5 million IO/s. Specific products are the 1U SF3010 and SF6010 which run SolidFire Element OS 4.0 with QoS control, the first one with ten 300GB 2.5-inch SSDs and 72GB read cache, the second one with ten 600GB 2.5-inch SSDs and 14GB read cache, both of them with two 10GbE ports. SolidFire protects data through an algorithm called Helix absorbing multiple concurrent failures across all levels of the storage system. Failed data are re-replicated within the system and ensures it never operates in a degraded state. Three technologies work in tandem to reduce capacity footprints and executed across the entire data store: de-dupe, compression and thin provisioning. To build a cloud, the company powers its systems with OpenStack and its block storage service named Cinder. Last month the start-up announced the integration of its all-SSD system with Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator.

Released date
November 2012

Price range
Redundant usable capacity is less than $4/GB and price-performance ratio is less than $1/IO/s, according to the company

Partners
Citrix, OpenStack, Arista Networks, Canonical, OnApp, Tier 3, VMware

Distribution
Sells direct to customers

≠ of customers
4 announced, 20+ in evaluation

Main customers
Calligo, ViaWest, CloudSigma, Databarracks, Crucial Cloud Hosting

Applications
For cloud providers as part of their IaaS offering.